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Microsoft Betting BIG On Cloud With Windows 8 And Tablets

The upcoming Windows 8 launch will cost a staggering amount. Microsoft, the driving force behind personal computing for 30 years, is betting its future on the cloud and tablet computing. And there are two schools of thought about the sanity of that bet.

The Windows 8 release date is October 26; the tech bellwether whose operating system runs most of the world’s PCs is tying its flag to mobile devices and cloud-based apps. In the process, it may be cutting the apron strings to the traditional PC, the device that Microsoft founder Bill Gates once said he wanted to put on every desktop.

source: Microsoft

The technology world has changed since Gates stepped away from Microsoft at the dawn of the 21st century. PC sales are flat—and have been for two years—while sales of smartphones and tablets are through the roof. The venerable desktop PC has been supplanted by the laptop, and tablets—led by the iPad—are starting to replace laptops.

Time for a big bet…

Steve Ballmer, who replaced Gates as CEO, sees Windows 8 as an opportunity to put his stamp on the company, and pivot it into a leader in mobile computing. He’s putting in motion not just a product launch, but a three-pronged campaign.

Within days of the Windows 8 rollout, we’ll see the launch of Windows Phone 8, the smartphone software that Microsoft hopes will get it back on track in the mobile market, where it has lagged for several years. And the same week will see the release of the Surface RT tablet, Microsoft’s first-ever computing device, which runs the cut-down “RT” version of Windows 8.

All Windows 8 devices will share a common look and feel, with “tiles” linked to apps filling the screen. For PCs, that means replacing the familiar Windows desktop, first introduced in 1995 and known by almost every man, woman and child on the planet. In its place is a new, “modern” user interface, codenamed Metro (although Microsoft is distancing itself from that name, thanks to a European trademark dispute).

Windows 8 will retain the other functionality of Windows 7, but Metro will be front and center.

PC users will face two big changes with Windows 8: Its emphasis on cloud-based apps over traditional software applications that need to be installed on the computer; and the way that Windows 8 is optimized for phones and tablets, putting an emphasis on touchscreen navigation. The user experience is deeply unfamiliar if you have to rely on a mouse to get around.

For enterprise users of the all-Metro, Windows RT version—which completely eschews the traditional Windows desktop—the cloud may be even more important. Access to legacy Windows desktop applications requires the use of desktop virtualization, essentially running the applications on a server and displaying them on your Windows RT tablet. That server could be in a traditional corporate data center, in a private cloud, or in a public cloud such as Microsoft’s Windows Azure.

With all this change in the air, the stakes are high for Microsoft, but Windows 8 probably is not a bet-the-company move. After all, Windows today generates less than one-quarter of Microsoft’s revenues (the majority comes from business and server software).

Yet if Windows 8 bombs, it could leave Microsoft taking on water and heading back to port. “Windows is one of their pillars and pretty much the foundation for everything,” says longtime Microsoft analyst Rob Enderle, who calls Windows 8 “a big risk.”

But Microsoft isn’t the only one at risk: Computer manufacturers—as well as makers of hard drives, monitors and other PC equipment—are as nervous as cats in a dog pound as they await the market’s verdict. If consumers turn their back on Windows 8 PCs, the already-hurting PC industry could go into an accelerated side.

However, other analysts believe that Microsoft is taking exactly the right approach. Another veteran Microsoft-watcher, Paul Thurrott, says Metro and RT are the future: “By engineering Windows 8 this way, and not just making a separate Metro-only OS for tablets and devices, Microsoft is sending us an implicit but, I think, clear message—which is that the future of general-purpose computing will occur via devices and not PCs.”

Like other consumer products, Windows 8′s success will depend largely on Microsoft’s ability to sell the idea of a retooled operating system. But change is often a hard sell, as Apple discovered when it first introduced the OS X operating system for Macs, suffering a brief decline in market share.

Microsoft is taking no chances: Windows 8 will roll out with a marketing campaign estimated at $1.5 to $1.8 billion (yes, billion with a “B”). That’s the biggest product launch in the history of the industry; it dwarfs the $200 million Microsoft spent to market Windows 95. In fact, notes Enderle, “the marketing effort is on a scale you don’t see outside presidential elections.”

So all-in-all, Windows 8 is a big bet, but one Microsoft thinks it can win.

Dave Einstein is a veteran print and digital journalist, having worked for The Associated Press, Los Angeles Times and Forbes.com. He currently writes the weekly Computing Q&A column for the San Francisco Chronicle.

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They should have realized this five years ago. Even after the company has decided to take the right direction, it suffers the big company syndrome. The biggest problem companies like Microsoft face is that they have very high IQ in solving problems, but very low IQ in identifying and understanding the problems. In the end, they waste 95% of their creative energy, and move very slowly.

Cloud? How much more resource and time Microsoft has had than smaller companies like Box and Dropbox? Yet they have not even accomplished a fraction of what these small companies have. Unfortunately, these small companies are simply too small to come up with an integrated solution, which only Microsoft can but has miserably failed to.

Think about Office 365. This is supposed to be all cloud-based. But other than moving the mailbox itself to the cloud, Microsoft has done very little to implement any true cloud features. For example, suppose you have received an e-mail attachment in Microsoft Office 365 mailbox. How do you place that attachment file into a cloud-based filesystem, and start to manage it on the cloud like its a network file? Does this sound like an exotic feature? Well, Microsoft does not know how to do it.

There is absolutely no integration of such cloud-based features in the current Microsoft cloud products. It’s not that they don’t have the ability to do this. They have a large number of smart engineers. It is that the management is too stupid to understand what are actually useful and important for users.

Windows 8 for cloud? I have used it for months already but don’t see anything so exciting as far as the cloud is concerned. It is only touching the cloud in a very superficial way. They still don’t get it.

In the world of information consumption, there is now one company that gets it. That’s Apple. But when it comes to productivity, no one seems to get it. I have high hopes for Microsoft to do something that’s useful. So far it’s all disappointing. Strangely, they did well with a game counsel, which is exactly the opposite of the kind of big things that Microsoft should give to the world but has failed to.

I’m sympathetic to much of your position, but do bear in mind that we’ve not yet seen the full extent of Microsoft’s strategy here. For example, the possibility of a cloud VDI service branded Azure.

As far as a cloud filesystem, you pretty much described Microsoft SkyDrive. We can already see the level of Office 2013 integration in the preview, and you can bet there’s as-yet-unannounced integration with Office 365.

But I have read so much negativity on this subject of MS8 OS revolution that I am not sure if its coming from the perspective of traditional “go after the big guy – hate” or “cautious optimism”. Many articles seem to be riddled with both and “fear” seems to be the common denominator which is detectable in all articles so I will take that approach to my reply.

Firstly, what I have NOT read in ANY article is Microsoft’s market research strategy. This is a HUGE conveniently omitted factor. MS has conducted an intense as well as extensive customer research campaign starting before their DEV edition. Then following that was all the renditions of the pre-production release – one [we] spent a lot of time testing. DEV release lasted on our PC’s for about 2 weeks and we wrote SCATHING reports on MS Blogs, crash reports, etc.

Then came the BETA – still running on our test PC with residual errors in hardware; WiFi device and Audio.

Now, all of our PC’s are running Windows 8 Release Preview and have been since day 1. We are staying with W8!

All of these renditions of W8 ARE the market research and a clever one at that. If W8 would have failed in any of these phases you would be writing about the radically failed Windows 8 – another attempt at Vista on steroids. Not the case!

They are not only making a far superior OS, far more secure, fastest Windows OS ever for the basic end-user but also a power OS for Developers like [us]; Microsoft is unifying the experience across all devices and THAT is a game changer!

Thanks, Bill. We did try to keep the balance here. Ultimately, we’ll have to wait and see how the reaction is, once the market has settled down. I still vividly remember the initial reaction to Windows XP — the received wisdom was that Microsoft would be abandoned by the enterprise. How foolish those predictions look today.

Big companies just finished migration from xp to w7. For sure they will skip w8. Home users that would like to use windows on a tablet migth benefit from the new UI, for all other there is hardly any reason. MS is good is forcing you work on your computer as you don’t want and don’t need. W8 is the next big fail of M$

Not to mention that big companies aren’t going to risk their data in MS’s cloud or with cloud apps. Data breaches are difficult enough to prevent, and MS doesn’t have a very good history of security with their software. I wouldn’t gamble on their hardware being secure either.

While it’s fair to say that Surface is yet to be proven in battle, I don’t think it’s fair to conclude, because Windows and Office have security vulnerabilities, that Azure is somehow insecure.

Lest we forget, Windows and Office, by the nature of their position in the market, each have an enormous target on their backs. All software has bugs — as proven by events such as Pwn2own — it’s how the vendor reacts to vulnerabilities that counts. Microsoft has proven itself to have a extremely mature and fast-acting security team.

No, of course MS is not spending that amount. It was always a ridiculous claim. This is not Apple.

This article stacks speculation on top of unsubstantiated rumours to contrive an article with a headline that sounds like something worth reading. Microsoft may have spent a tiny fraction of the amount claimed, which makes the headline spurious at best.

The biggest criticism of the new Windows 8 ads is that they are so busy showing off the fun side of the OS that they stupidly fail to mention the important facts and miss the biggest selling-points and key reasons for upgrading — e.g. the astonishing performance improvements like super-fast boot, 1 second WiFi reconnect instead of 15, etc, etc.